“Why? What can you do?”
“I don’t know. They both know they’ll hang together if anybody slips. They’ll be careful. I’ve gone over it a hundred times. They did a good job. There aren’t any loose ends. You said you don’t play chess, didn’t you?”
“I don’t.”
“Sometimes you see an attack shaping up. It’s flawless. If you make all the expected moves, you’re going to be slowly and inevitably defeated. So you don’t make the expected moves. You make a wild move. It’s meaningless. But they don’t know positively that it’s meaningless. So they have to guard against the unknown. Sometimes it can put a strong attack off balance, just enough.”
After he left I thought about what he had said. Though I didn’t understand how it worked on a chess board, I thought I knew how it worked in life. I could even relate it, in a small way, to my own experiences.
They had the plot and the plan and the program. They were the ones — Linda and Jeff — who had moved. I was the one who was being whirled down the careful channel they had dug to the inevitable destination they had planned for me. I paced for a time and then I sat down and made a careful evaluation of my actions. What did they expect me to do? Obviously, I was expected to sit in this cell and insist that my story was the true one, and so instruct my lawyer, and wait calmly for a trial that would end me.
Just so long as I kept to the pattern, they would feel calm. Should there be any deviation from the pattern, they would begin to feel uneasy.
I wondered how I could deviate from the pattern. The most obvious idea was to escape. I discarded that at once. It was idiotic. Meaningless.
Yet David Hill had spoken of the meaningless move. And how the opponent must guard against the unknown. Purely as an intellectual game, it would hurt nothing to think of escape. It startled me a little to find that I could contemplate it even as a game. Linda had indeed changed me.
I knew that my cell was on the top floor. There were two cells to the left of the guardroom, of which this was one. The other was empty. Beyond the guardroom, on the other end of the corridor, were a drunk tank and a row of smaller cells. There were three stories and a basement. No elevators. To reach the stairs it would be necessary to go through the guardroom. I had no idea of who might be in there, or even if there was always somebody there. My radio was plugged in. I turned it up higher and examined the windows. They were casement windows worked by interior cranks. The mesh screen inside was heavy. They would open only so far, not far enough to squeeze through, even if I could cut the heavy screening. And the panes were small.
It had to be through the door, if at all. My mind moves somewhat ponderously, but with logic. I could not see myself going out armed, cowing the guards. They would not let me walk out, at least not as Paul Cowley, slayer. I would either have to be someone else, or invisible. Disguising myself presented almost insurmountable difficulties. I put that line of thought aside and addressed myself to the problem of the cell door.
In spite of the massive look of the door, the lock did not seem impressive. The jailer used two keys to open the door. One unlocked a flap arrangement which covered the second keyhole, thus preventing the prisoner from reaching through the bars and trying to pick the main lock. When he closed the cell door, the main lock snapped into place, and then he used his key just for the outer flap arrangement. The door fitted closely, but in the small crack I could see the brass gleam of the metal that engaged the slot in the steel frame. Each time he pulled the door shut, he would give it a shake to test it.
It was not until an hour after darkness that I had the vague stirring of an idea of how to cheat the lock. As it was a spring lock, I suspected that the force which held the brass portion in the slot was not great. It would resist great lateral force, of course, but if it could be pushed from behind...
At breakfast on Tuesday I was able to get a better look at the mechanism. During the morning, by sliding a piece of paper down the crack, I was able to get an accurate idea of the dimensions of the orifice in the steel frame. Later in the afternoon, after another discouraging visit from Journeyman, I took the back off the portable radio. I had to use one prong of the plug as a screwdriver. It would not fit the screw heads until I had rubbed it to a smaller dimension on the rough wall. I disabled the radio, taking out what I decided I needed — one short length of tough wire, a longer length of flexible wire. To break the tough wire to the length I wanted, I had to hold it in my teeth and wind it around and around until it snapped. I bent the short length into a U with square corners, the approximate size of the lock orifice. I knew the bolt was loose in the orifice by the way it chattered when the jailer tested the door each time. It took a long time to fasten the longer, more flexible wire to the small piece. I had removed a small thin plate from the interior of the radio. I put the back on.
During the afternoon I opened the back of the toilet, removed the rubber valve stop and gouged a small piece off it. I heated it with my matches, and when it bubbled and was sticky, I smeared it liberally on the small U-shaped piece of wire. An hour later it was still satisfactorily sticky to the touch. I managed with great difficulty to separate a six-inch piece of the rubber plug-in cord of the radio and peel back the insulation on both ends.
I was ready then, though not yet committed. It had seemed merely an interesting problem in mechanics. My uncommunicative jailer would visit me for the last time when he came to take away the dinner plate and spoon. Usually I passed them between the bars after, at his orders, scraping what I didn’t eat into the toilet.
I left the moment of decision until the very last moment. I even reached for the plate and spoon and then slumped back on the bed. He yelled at me in irritation and then came in. I moved slowly toward the cell door. My right hand was in front of me. I slipped the U-shaped bit of wire into the orifice and pressed it in tightly just as he yelled at me. I turned back and he told me to stay away from the door. I was certain he would see the length of flexible wire that hung down from the U-shaped piece. But he was too angry to be observant.
He clashed the door shut, mumbling. He went away and I let out a deep breath. After the guardroom door closed, I fished the hanging piece of wire out with a scrap of paper. When I held it in my hand, I had in effect a line fastened to a hook, with the hook firmly around the bolt. I held the thin plate in my left hand, the wire in my right. I exerted a steady pressure. The bolt slid easily back. I slipped the plate in quickly. The wire pulled free. The bolt spring held the plate in place. The door was unlocked. I stretched out. If any visitor had come, I would have had to snatch the plate out. The bolt would have clicked into place, and I would have had it to do over again. But no one came. The darkness came slowly. I waited until midnight. By pressing my cheek against the bars I could see the strip of light under the guardroom door. I had heard no rumble of conversation in a long time. The odds were that only one man was in the room.
I took the six-inch piece of insulated wire and shorted out the wall plug. Had the guardroom been on a different circuit, I would have had to start over again with another plan. I ran to the door and looked again. The strip of light was gone. I opened the cell door, catching the plate before it could fall. I closed the cell door and the lock clicked into place. The wire I had used was in my pocket.
I hurried silently up the dark hall. The guardroom door Opened inward onto the corridor, I remembered. I flattened myself against the wall beside the door. I heard somebody kick a chair in the darkness and curse. I saw a flickering light under the door. I had expected to feel shaken, jittery. I felt absolutely cold, and absolutely certain of myself.